Preview Mode Links will not work in preview mode

Thanks for joining us! Let me know if there are any topics you'd like us to cover by sending an email to me at craigpeterson . com!

Jun 26, 2022

Been to a Hospital Website Lately?
Facebook May Have Your Personal Information!

Hey, Facebook isn't the only company doing this, but there's an article from the markup. They did a study and caught Facebook. This is absolutely crazy -- receiving sensitive medical information. We're gonna talk about that right now.

[Automated transcript follows]

This is really concerning for a lot of people. And, and for good reason, frankly, I've been talking about this.

[00:00:22] I, I think the first time I talked about it was over a decade ago and it has to do with what are called pixels. Now, marketers obviously want to show you ads and they want show you ads based on your interest. And frankly, as a consumer, if I'm looking for a new F one. I wouldn't mind seeing ads from competing car dealers or, you know, used car places, et cetera, to try and sell me that Ford truck.

[00:00:53] It makes sense, right? If I'm looking for shoes, why not show me ads for shoes, but what happens when we start talking about the medical business about the legal business things get murky and people get very upset. You see the way these pixels work is you'll put a pixel, like for instance, a Facebook pixel.

[00:01:15] If you go to Craig peterson.com, I've got this pixel on there from Facebook. And what it allows me to do now is retarget Facebook user. So you go to my site to go to a page on my site, and this is true for, uh, pretty much every website out there. And. I know that you went and you were looking for this, so I can retarget you in an ads.

[00:01:37] I'll show you an ad. In other words, on Facebook now I've never actually done that ever. Uh, I I'm like the world's worst marketer, frankly. Uh, and, uh, but I do have that on there because it gives me some other numbers, statistics, and, and really helps you to understand how the website's being used, which I think makes a whole lot of sense.

[00:01:58] So there are marketers that are using this for obvious reasons. Now, I think you understand what the pixel is. It is literally a little picture that is one pixel by one pixel, and it tends to blend in, I think even in most cases, now these pixels from different. Places like Facebook are actually transparent.

[00:02:19] So you, you don't even see it on the page, but the idea is now they have a foothold on a website that doesn't belong to them. In this case, Facebook now has access to information about a website that you visited that has nothing to do with Facebook. okay. So that's the basics of how these pixels work and they're almost impossible to get rid of because in reality, many websites, mine included will even grab graphics from other websites just because you know, it it's, I'm quoting another article I pull in their graphic.

[00:03:00] Of course, they'm gonna point to that other site. Why would I take that picture? Put it on my site. I don't own the rights to it. But if he'll let me that other website will, let me go ahead and show that graphic on my website, cuz there's ways to restrict it. If they don't want me doing that, they could stop me from doing it.

[00:03:18] Then I I'm going to just go to the original website so they can get the credit for it's their property still. I'm not violating any copyright laws, et cetera. Does that make sense to. So what's the difference between the Facebook pixel and a picture I'm pulling from another random website? Well, the obvious thing is it's coming from a Facebook domain of some sort.

[00:03:40] So, so there are ways to stop it, but there's just as many ways to get around stopping it, frankly. Well, Let's move on to something a little more sensitive. We have had problems that I reported on years ago of people going to an emergency room in a hospital. Now, when you're in that emergency room, your phone has GPS capabilities still.

[00:04:06] It knows you went in the emergencyentrance to the hospital and you are. Opening it up. Maybe you're looking around, maybe you're reading articles, maybe you're plotting your trip home using Google maps. You are being tracked depending on what apps you have on your phone. If you have an Android versus an iPhone, what you've enabled, what you haven't enabled.

[00:04:29] Right? All of that sort of stuff. well, this now has become a problem because as I reported there have been people who went to the hospital, went to the emergency room and started seeing ads from what you might call ambulance, chasing lawyers. Have you been injured? Is it someone else's fault? Call me right now.

[00:04:54] Do he cheat him in. if that sort of thing showed up on your phone, would you get a little upset, a little nervous saying, what are they doing, trying to cash in on, on my pain, maybe literal pain. And it's not as though those ads are just showing up while you are in the emergency room, because now they've tagged you.

[00:05:15] They know that you are in that emergency room. So off they'll. They will go ahead and track you and send you ads even after you leave. Hey, I wanna remind you if you want to get this, uh, this week's list of articles. I, I put out every week, my insider show notes. It has become very popular. Thousands of people get that every week.

[00:05:41] Go right now to Craig peterson.com. I'll also send out a little bit of training. I do that. I have special reports. I send out. I've got more stuff I'm doing, but you gotta be on the email list. Craig peterson.com to get on my free email list now. What's happened here now is markup went ahead and looked at Newsweek's top 100 hospitals in America.

[00:06:06] They went to their websites and they found about a third of the hospitals using what's called the Meel. That is the Facebook pixel I was referring to earlier. So it sends a little bit of data. Whenever someone clicks a button to let's say, schedule a doctor's appointment. Why does it do that? Well, because the Facebook pixel is on the scheduling page.

[00:06:33] Let's say there's scheduling page for oncology on the website. I guess who knows that you are going to see an oncologist? Facebook? Why? Well, because the hospital has put a Facebook tracking pixel on that page. So Facebook knows, Hey, he was on the oncologist page. Maybe he has cancer. I should start showing him ads from other hospitals and from cancer medications, et cetera, etcetera, that is happening.

[00:07:03] Right now, 33 of these top 100 hospitals in America. Th these are the top 100, according to Newsweek's list. Have that information. Now that data is connected to your internet. Address. So it's kinda like your computer's mailing address and they can link that back to usually to a specific individual or to a household.

[00:07:30] So now they have a receipt of the appointment request. that's gone to Facebook now. They don't have everything you filled out on the page or anything, you know, you added in your social security number, maybe other medical information. Facebook didn't get all of that, but they do know that you visited the hospital's website and which pages you visited on that website.

[00:07:56] So markup went ahead and contacted these hospitals. So, for example, John John's Hopkins hospital, they did find a Facebook pixel tracking on the appointment, scheduling page. They informed John's Hopkins of how that is a leak of personal information. And after being contacted by the markup, they did not remove the track.

[00:08:27] also, by the way, when the markup reached out to them, the hospital did not respond UCLA Reagan medical center. They had of course a pixel and they did remove it from the scheduling page. Although they declined to comment, New York Presbyterian hospital, all these hospitals have that pixel and they did not remove it.

[00:08:49] Northwestern Memorial hospital. Again, they got the tracking pixel did not remove it after they were informed about the security problems, duke university hospital, same thing. Most of these, by the way, did not respond to them. University of Pennsylvania, Houston Methodist hospital, the university of Chicago medical center.

[00:09:11] Uh, the last two of those did remove the pixel. Uh, Scripps Memorial hospital out in LA JOA, California. There are many Brigham and women's Faulkner hospital. They were informed that they had the tracking picture pixel on the, on the, uh, scheduling page. They did not remove it, but you know, the time of this article, a Tufts medical center, same thing did not remove it, uh, out in Sanford in San Diego.

[00:09:39] Same problem. John's Hopkins Bayview medical center, John Jefferson health, Thomas Jefferson university, hospitals, Loyola. These are big name hospitals. I'm looking at these that goes on and on sharp Memorial hospital, Henry Ford hospital. Uh, let's see some more, I'm trying to, oh, Massachusetts general hospital.

[00:10:00] They did not have the tracking pixel Brigham in women's hospital, no tracking pixel on the scheduling page. So some of these hospitals were already doing it right. They re they recognized that putting this Facebook. Pixel on may help them with some of the marketing and understanding the market a little better, which is what I do, but it's also giving personal information, personal health information to Facebook and Facebook's advertisers.

[00:10:32] So they didn't put it on so good for them. Again, mass general Brigham and women's, uh, Sanford Mount Sinai, university of Michigan hospital and, and others, of course. So very good news there in general. Again, don't be worried about a pixel on just a random website because it probably is being used to help with stats to know what's being used on the website.

[00:10:58] And maybe, maybe just maybe using it to send a little ad to you on Facebook later. Of course, you're listening to Craig Peter son. You can get my insider show notes for absolutely free. And my little mini trainings. Oh three to five minutes every week@craigpeterson.com. Just sign up on the homepage.

[00:11:23] You know, I've got it on my homeowner's policy. I have a special business policy for it. And it's something that you should seriously consider, but you need to understand first. So we're gonna talk about it. What is cyber insurance? Uh, that's what's up now?

[00:11:41] Cyber insurance is something that many businesses have looked at, not all businesses have, which is kind of crazy. If you ask me according to the industry statistics right now, less than 1% market penetration for cyber insurance and is expected to.

[00:12:02] Into a $20 billion industry by 2025. That is some serious money. So what is this cyber insurance? For instance, there's a rider on my home insurance for, for cyber insurance and I have special cyber insurance from a, a big company underwritten, but it is for anything that happens. In my business, that's related to cyber security and it also covers my clients because that's what we do for living is cyber security.

[00:12:37] If they are following our guidelines. So it's pretty darn cool when you get right down to it, because these risks that we have in the digital world are really every. So if you're a large organization, if you're a small little enterprise, are you going to get hacked? You know, bottom line, anybody could potentially get hacked because the bad guys have gotten pretty good.

[00:13:06] And most of us in business have gotten pretty lax AADA because of all of this, but not everybody understands when we're talking about cyber insurance. What does cyber mean? Well, the idea is that cyber insurance is created to protect organizations and individuals against digital risks. So we're talking about things like ransonware malware fishing campaigns.

[00:13:34] So for instance, I got a call just this week from a listener who again, had their operating account emptied out, hated when that happens. And so they lost everything. They lost all of the money in the account and they're trying to get it back. I got an email this week and, uh, from a lady that I, there's not much I can do for her.

[00:13:56] I pointed her in the right direction, but her father, I think it was, had his digital wallet of cryptocurrency completely emptied, completely stolen. Can you believe this sort of stuff, right? It's happening every day. You might have insurance that covers that, but you might not. Traditional insurance policies are only looking at physical risks, so they will take the physical risk things like damage to equipment, or maybe you have livestock or you have stock an inventory, a building different locations.

[00:14:38] That's your standard stuff. But cyber insurance is to allow businesses to transfer the costs associated with recovery from the losses incurred when there's some form of cybersecurity breach. Now that's a pretty big deal. because the losses can be huge. It isn't just ransomware where maybe it, it costs you a million dollars in ransom payments.

[00:15:08] Or if you're an individual, a retiree, maybe it only costs you 25,000 in ransom payments. And I know that's a lot, especially for retiree. But there is loss of reputation. There's loss of business, cuz you couldn't conduct business cuz you couldn't use your computers. Right? All of that sort of stuff. You got people that you have to bring in, you have to bring in a special team to try and recover your data.

[00:15:33] Maybe try and figure out what had happened. Right. All of that sort of stuff. So be careful cyber insurance, a lot of people kind of mistake it for policy that pays off. Attackers to retrieve or unlock data. That's not what it's really for cyber insurance is something that allows you to, I guess the term in, in the industry is transfer risk when your online security controls fail and.

[00:16:01] Basically all of them could fail. It, it, it depends, right? If you're a huge company, you can hire a bigger team for a security operation center, but at the same time, you also have more employees that are causing more problems. So look at it entirely business interruption, payments to experts to recover the data.

[00:16:23] Compensation for bodily injuries, uh, depending obviously on the resulting damage and the particular policy and the rates are gonna vary based on the maturity of your cyber defenses. So this is something that I've been big on for a long time, the cyber security maturity CMMC and what that helps 'em to determine is.

[00:16:49] What are your rates gonna be? So if you went out and you're just using the cable modem that they, that the, uh, company, your cable company provided for you, or you go to a big box retailer, and that's where you bought your firewall and switches, and you've got your wonderful little Lenovo PCs or Dows or whatever, and you're running, uh, Norton antivirus.

[00:17:13] You are not well covered. You are not very mature from a cybersecurity standpoint. The other thing you need to be able to do is make sure you've got your asset management all in line, that you have policies and procedures in place for when things happen. You gotta have it all put together, but the average cyber insurance policy for a small to mid-size company in 2021 was about $1,600.

[00:17:41] For $1 million in cyber liability coverage. Now that's not really bad at all. Now there are limits to what the provider will pay. They will often, if you do get nailed, They'll come in and double check that, everything that you said, all of those boxes that you checked when you were applying for your cyber security insurance, make sure you actually did all of them.

[00:18:08] Okay. Yeah. Kind of a big deal. And you not only will they not pay out, if you didn't do everything that you said you were going to be doing. but the other problem is you might end up getting sued by. Okay. So expect a counter suit if you decide to soothe them. So don't lie on those fors people. Okay. All right.

[00:18:32] Um, cyber claims, unlike non-technical events, like again, a fire flood storm damage, the cyber insurance claim might be determined by means of attack and your ability or your effort to prevent it. As I was saying, make sure you've got the checklist and this is something I think I, I should probably put a course together on to help you guys with, or maybe even a little bit of consulting for people.

[00:19:01] Let me know, just send an email to me, me@craigpeterson.com. And uh, if you're interested in more info about cyber insurance, you can either look at this week's newsletter that you can. By again, going to Craig peterson.com and a link to this particular article I'm looking at, or you can tell me, Hey, listen, I'd love a little course or little support, a little help.

[00:19:24] Okay. I think it makes a lot of sense. So does your business qualify for cyber insurance? Well, some do some don't, uh, you might not see yourself as a target. For the bad guys, but I'll tell you, my 85 year old father was conned by some of these cyber attack guys. Okay. And he doesn't have much money. He, he's not the bank of, uh, England bank of America.

[00:19:52] None of these big banks or anything. Oh. Is a retiree living at home trying to make ends meet. So the same, thing's true for you as a business, you as an individual now. You are vulnerable most likely to a cyber attack, but you've got to really manage your risk posture. You gotta do things, right. So that's the bottom line there.

[00:20:16] That's what we try and help you do. But you can find information about this again, you can just email me, me, Craig peterson.com and ask for the info on cyber insurance, or if you're already a subscriber to my newsletter. That went out Tuesday morning. So just check your mail. Maybe it's in the spam box from Tuesday morning and you'll find a lot more information linked right from there.

[00:20:42] Craig peterson.com stick around. We'll be right back.

[00:20:51] There are a lot of complaints about how some of these cryptocurrencies are very non green using tons of energy. And now the prices are going down. We're seeing a number of really weird things happening.

[00:21:07] Cryptocurrency, as you probably have heard, has taken a tumble. Now, some of the cryptocurrencies, particularly of course, someone you might know most is Bitcoin use a lot of computing power.

[00:21:20] You see, what they're trying to do is basically solve a very complex mathematical problem. And in order to do that, they need a lot of computing power. Now you can certainly run it on your little desktop computer, that program to compute those things. It's called mining. So you're mining for Bitcoin.

[00:21:42] You're, you're trying to solve these mathematical problems and there's a theoretical limit to how many Bitcoins could actually potentially be mind looking right now. They're saying that circulating Bitcoin right now. Is about 19 million Bitcoin that are out there. And Bitcoin is worth about $20,000 right now, down from its huge, huge, huge high.

[00:22:11] That was, uh, more than two and a half times. What it's worth right now. So, how do you mind? Well, if you take that computer and you run the software, it's gonna do some mining and it is probably going to cost you more in electricity nowadays to mine. One Bitcoin than that Bitcoin is worth. In fact, it certainly will cost you more now.

[00:22:37] Uh, that's why the people that are professional Bitcoin minors have taken a different tact and what they've done. Is they found places where they can get cheap electricity. For instance, Finland, where they're using geothermal produced electricity. They're also using the cold air outside in order to cool down.

[00:23:00] The computers themselves as they're trying to compute this, but there's another thing that they've been doing. And that is well, how about we buy a coal plant? That's been shut down and that's happened. So they take that coal plant. They bring it back online. They burn the coal, they produce electricity at a cheaper rate than they could buy it.

[00:23:23] but behind all of this is the computing power. And what miners found a long time ago is it's better to have thousands of compute units working on solving these problems than it is just having. I don't know how many CPUs are in your computer for eight. Com, um, CPUs. How many? Well, I, how far can you get with those?

[00:23:48] Yeah, they're fast, but we need thousands of computers. So what they found is that GPU's graphical processing units. Kind of met their goals. You see a GPU is actually composed of thousands of computers, little compute units. Now they can't do real fancy math. They can't do anything particularly fancy.

[00:24:13] They're really designed to move. Pixels around on a screen. In other words, they're designed to help gamers have a nice smooth game while they're playing. They can be used. In fact, they're used all of the time in desktop computers, just for regular display of a webpage, for instance, or if you're watching a video, all of that is part of what they're doing.

[00:24:39] With graphic processing units. And if you've been paying attention, you probably have noticed if you particularly, if you're a gamer that the price for GPUs has gone way up, not only has it gone way up and it isn't just due to the lockdown and the supply chain problems. but they're very, very, very hard to get now.

[00:25:02] Yeah. Some of that is due to supply chain problems. No doubt about it. But most of these GPUs, according to some of the numbers I've seen, have actually been bought by these professional mining companies. In fact, many of them have gone the next step and they have what called custom silicone. These are completely customized process.

[00:25:28] sometimes they're using Asics. Sometimes they're using other things, but these custom processors that are really good at solving that problem that they have to solve in order to mine, a bit Bitcoin or one of these other currencies. So you, you see how that all works. There's a number of GPU manufacturers and something else interesting has happened because of the drop in value of pretty much all of the cryptocurrencies.

[00:26:00] And that is these GPS are going byebye. Right. Do does a company that is now no longer trading. That's no longer operating. Uh, we've seen at least two of these crypto mining companies just completely disappear. So now all of their hardware is going up for sale. You'll find it on EBA. So I, I wanna warn you, if you are looking for a GPU of some sort for your computer, maybe if you're a gamer, be very, very careful.

[00:26:37] We've got a buyer beware situation here because you're not just buying a GPU. A graphics processing card, uh, that has been lightly used. It was sitting in a terminal. Maybe it's a GPU. Like I use them where, when I'm doing video editing, it does use the GPU, even some of the audio editing. It uses the GPU.

[00:26:59] I'm looking at it right now and I've got some, uh, GPU utilization going on. I've got about, uh, 6% of my GPU in use right now on this computer. So. What the problem is is that these minors who are selling their old GPUs have been running them full Bo 24, 7. That's hard on anything. Isn't it. So what, uh, what's happening here is that you are seeing a market getting flooded with GPUs.

[00:27:35] You really don't wanna. All right. Does that make sense? Uh, you know, there we've lost more than 50% this year already in some of these, uh, cryptocurrencies that are out there coin base has had an interesting year Celsius, a major cryptocurrency bank, suspended withdrawals, uh, just here in the last few.

[00:28:01] Coin based crypto exchange announced a round of layoffs. Also here, they paused their hiring a month or two ago. It it's not going very well and prices for new and used graphic cards are continuing to fall. The peak price was late in 2021, a little bit early in 2022, but now you can go to Amazon new egg, best buy and buy current generation GPUs for prices that really would seem like bargain six months ago.

[00:28:35] And pricing for used GPUs has fallen even further, which is the caveat aura URA thing here that I'm warning everybody about. You need to proceed. With caution. So there's a lot of scams, a lot of bait and switches. You know, that's been kind of normal for some things over the years on eBay. I'm afraid, but I've had pretty good luck with eBay, but any high value eBay purchase CPUs have been mining cryptocurrencies at full tilt for months or years have problems in new GPU.

[00:29:12] Would not have had, you know, this heat that they generate, the dust that gets into them, that the heat is messing with can really degrade the performance and degrade the usage of that GPU here over time. Dust can also, uh, cause problems with the thermal paste that's in them could be dried out thermal paste because of the heat and that causes them to crack and causes other problems.

[00:29:40] So if you buy a used GP that looks dirty or runs hot, removing and cleaning the fan and heat sink, reapplying, fresh thermal paste. Could potentially restore loss performance, and maybe you can even get that new Sony PlayStation because GPS are becoming available. Again. Visit me online Craig peterson.com and get my weekly insider show notes right there.

[00:30:07] Craig peterson.com. Sign up now.

[00:30:13] Self-driving is relatively new technology. And, uh, our friends at Tesla just fired an employee who posted videos of a full self-driving accident. Uh, he's done it before.

[00:30:30] Tesla has a very interesting background. In fact, Elon Musk has gotten more interesting over time. And particularly lately the stuff he's saying, the stuff he's doing, but his companies have really made some amazing progress.

[00:30:48] Now, one of the things that Elon did pretty well pretty early on was he decided he was going to start selling. A self-driving feature for his cars. And back in the day, you could buy it. This was before it was ready at all for, I think it was 5,000 and, uh, it was good for whenever they came out with it.

[00:31:15] And then it went up to 7,000 and then I think it went to 12,000 and now it's you pay him monthly, but in reality, There are no fully self-driving qualified Teslas on the road today. It will be a little while before that happens. So this ex Tesla employee by the name of John Burnell is quoted in ours Technica saying that he was fired for posting YouTube videos about Tesla's full self-driving beta.

[00:31:48] Now this is called F S D. And if you know, Computers, you know what beta is? Beta means, Hey, you know, should work, could work, probably has some problems. And that's exactly what it is. Now. Tesla told California regulators that the full self-driving beta lacks true autonomous features. And that's probably how they got by getting with putting this car on the road, these cars on the road.

[00:32:19] So this X employee. Says that Tesla also cut off access to the full self driving beta in the 2021 Tesla model three that he owns. Now. He said that he paid for it. He had it legitimately, and yet Tesla cut him off from, and I guess. Anybody can try and sign up for it. I don't know all of the details behind getting that beta code.

[00:32:46] If you wanted to, you probably could investigate a little bit further, but the video that he posted on February 7th provided a frame by frame analysis of a collision of his Tesla with a Ballard, a a Ballard. Those are those stanchions, those, uh, cement pillars. They usually have. Plastic on the outside that you'll see, you know, protecting sidewalks or in this case it was protecting a bike lane in San Jose.

[00:33:19] So he said, no matter how minor this accident was, it was the first full self-driving beta collision caught on camera. That is irrefutable. And he says I was fired from Tesla in February with my U YouTube being cited as the reason why, even though my uploads are for my personal vehicle off company, time or property with software, I paid for.

[00:33:45] And he has a, um, channel called AI addict that you can find over there on YouTube if it hasn't been taken down yet. Right. Uh, he said that he got a notice that his full self-driving beta was disabled be based on his recent driving data, but that didn't seem to fit because the morning I got fired, he says I had zero proper use strikes.

[00:34:10] On my vehicle. So yeah, I, I can't say as I really would blame him, uh, him being in this case, Elon Musk for firing this guy, but it's an interesting little video to watch. It's like two and a half minutes. You'll see. And it, the guy has his hand on the steering wheel and the car is steering. Itself down the roadway and there's no other traffic really on the road.

[00:34:38] I don't know when this was like a, a Sunday or something, but you can see on the screen, it is detecting things like the, the little, uh, construction pillars that are on the side of the road. And he's in a left. Turn only lane and his Tesla turns, left the steering. Wheel's kind of going a little back and forth, right?

[00:34:58] As it tries to make up his mind what it's going to do and he's driving down, he just passed a ups truck. Although I would not have passed personally, the way he passed, which is the. The car decided it was going to, um, get closer to that ups truck. I, I would've purposely gone further away. And then what happens is he goes around another corner where there's some Ballards.

[00:35:26] That are in the roadway. And of course the idea behind them is so the cars don't go in and accidentally strike a cyclist. But around that corner where there is a crosswalk crossing the street, there's no Ballard. So people don't have to kind of get around them. And then the Ballards start off again. So the Tesla got kind of confused by this and looking at the screen, it doesn't show the, these Ballards.

[00:35:56] Being recognized. So the driver of the car grabs the stern wheel takes over at the very last second, but did actually hit the Ballard. Uh, no two ways about it here. He hit it and the car is stopped and it's just a minor scratch. He's showing it on his, uh, on his screen here. But I gotta say overall, it looks like it performed quite admirably.

[00:36:24] And the fact that this apparently is the. Uh, the only time it was actually caught on video. That's interesting too, but the cars of course have cameras on them too. So I'm sure. In other cases it did record a video of it. So CNBC said it obtained a copy of Tesla's internal social media policy, and it says it makes no direct reference.

[00:36:48] To criticizing the company's product in public. So we'll see what happens. Uh, apparently too, they are saying that this is the first accident in a year of testing this full self-driving. So that is darn good, frankly. And, uh, he's saying, you know, some people are saying I should have reacted sooner, which I should have.

[00:37:09] But in my year of testing, the full stop driving is usually really good at detecting objects last minute and slowing to avoid. So I don't know. We'll see what happens here. Tesla's doing a very good job. Hey, and I got another car story for you. This one, I. Think is totally, totally cool. You might remember Congress passed a law back in the seventies saying that we had to have what these cafe standards for vehicles efficiencies.

[00:37:36] In other words, you had to have certain fuel efficiency across all of the cars that you manufactured, you know? Okay. It is good enough, whatever. And, uh, they, they weren't able to make. uh, the car manufacturers, they weren't able to hit it until they came up with a whole new ignition technology for the cars.

[00:38:00] And that of course is fuel injection. You might remember we had car braiders and all of the cars, not very efficient. The engines themselves aren't very efficient, but we came up with fuel injection. And that helped the car manufacturers to meet these new cafe standards. Now, unfortunately, car manufacturers have removed weight from the cars in order to gain fuel efficiency in order to meet these federal requirements.

[00:38:28] So they've done things like taking out the full size spare tire, right? You, you had that before and that full size spare tire is now replaced with. Stupid a little tire, right? That, you know, you can limp down the road a little ways, but not very far, but they've also removed steel and various metals from other parts of the car.

[00:38:47] And many people have said it's made the cars less safe. The same time they've added more safety features like the side impact airbags and, and other things and, and airbags that will Mame. But, but that's a different story entirely. Uh, but this is very, very cool because there's a company called transient plasma systems TPS, and they came up with this new advanced ignition system that uses plasma.

[00:39:17] They've designed it in such a way that it replaces your spark plugs in your. And now they put the ignition module in that uses nanosecond duration, pulses of plasma to ignite that air fuel mixture that's inside the cylinder. So you're still doing the fuel injection, but you're igniting it with a nanosecond worth of.

[00:39:43] Plasma. Isn't that just amazing. So they've tested that technology 2019 is when they came out with it and they did some bench testing, but now it's almost ready for production. So they're doing now with vehicle manufacturers, validation testing. It is frankly very cool. And they don't have to do it on brand new engines either.

[00:40:08] They will come up with retro Kitt fixed fixes. Now, imagine this getting 20% better mileage by basically replacing your spark plugs and a little more firmware changes in your engine controller. No question about that one, right. But this is frankly. Absolutely amazing. Now it's going to take a lot of years before we move to electric vehicles.

[00:40:34] For a lot of reasons. We're not ready. The country isn't ready. The infrastructure isn't ready. People aren't ready. The cars aren't ready. We don't even know what. To do with the batteries. People complain about nuclear waste while there are now huge fields full of these batteries while they're trying to figure out what do we do with the used batteries from these electric or hybrid cars, because man, they it's a huge problem.

[00:40:59] All kinds of toxic stuff in them. And they haven't been good at being able to recycle 'em it's not like the old lead acid batteries. That are very easy to recycle. So it's going to be years before they really stop selling any of these internal combustion engines and even longer before they ban internal combustion engines.

[00:41:21] From the roadways. So this plasma ignition system is going to really, really help 20%. That is darn good. And I am looking at the article right now. They used this Toyota engine. This is a 2.5 liter Toyota Camry Atkinson cycle, thermal efficiency around 40%, which is absolutely amazing. Good job Toyota. And.

[00:41:48] Replaced the spark plug with this. Ignition system, this new ignition system using of course plasma and they found some amazing, amazing, uh, statistics here improvements. So in some cases they're seeing. The spark plugs and the plasmas getting 6% increase in fuel economy and others are seeing 20% increases.

[00:42:17] Of course, they've got to do more testing, extreme heat, extreme, cold, wet, dry, but that's gonna be happening. And we might see this in our cars in the next couple of years. Make sure you sign up right now. For my newsletter, get my insider show notes for free Craig peterson.com.

[00:42:39] Hey, it looks like if you did not invest in crypto, you were making a smart move and not moving. Wow. We got a lot to talk about here. Crypto has dived big time. It's incredible. What's happened. We get into that more.

[00:42:56] Crypto currencies. It, it it's a term for all kinds of these basically non-government sanctioned currencies.

[00:43:06] And the idea behind it was I should be able to trade with you and you should be able to trade with me. We should be able to verify the transactions and it's kind of nobody's business as to what's happening behind the scenes. And yet in reality, Everybody's business because all of those transactions are recorded in a very public way.

[00:43:30] So crypto in this case does not mean secret or cryptography. It's actually referring to the way the ledgers work and your wallets and, and fact, the actual coins themselves, a lot of people have bought. I was talking with my friend, Matt earlier this week and Matt was saying, Hey, listen, uh, I made a lot of money off of crypto.

[00:43:57] He's basically a day trader. He watches it. Is it going up? Is it going down? Which coin is doge coin? The way to go? Cuz Elon must just mentioned it. Is it something else? What should I do? And he buys and sells and has made money off of it. However, a lot of people have. And held onto various cryptocurrencies.

[00:44:19] Of course, the most popular one. The one everybody knows about is Bitcoin and Bitcoin is pretty good stuff, you know, kind of bottom line, but 40% right now of Bitcoin investors are underwater. Isn't that incredible because of the major dropoff from the November peak. And this was all started by a problem that was over at something called Tara Luna, which is another cryptocurrency now.

[00:44:51] You know, already that there is a ton of vol a ton of, uh, changes in price in various cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin being of course a real big one where, you know, we've seen 5,000, $10,000 per Bitcoin drops. It, it really is an amazingly, uh, fluid if you will coined. So there's a number of different people that have come out with some plans.

[00:45:19] How about if we do kinda like what the us dollar used to do, which is it's tied to a specific amount of gold or tied to a specific amount of silver. Of course, it's been a while since that was the case. Uh, president Nixon is the one that got us off of those standards, but. Having gold, for instance, back in your currency means that there is going to be far less fluctuation and your currency means something.

[00:45:49] See, the whole idea behind currency markets for government is yeah, you do print money and you do continue to increase the amount of money you print every year. Because what you're trying to do is create money for the. Goods product services that are created as well. So if, if we create another million dollars worth of services in the economy, there should be another million dollars in circulation that that's the basic theory.

[00:46:20] Monetary theory really boiling it. Right. Down now of course, you know, already our government has printed way more than it. Maybe should have. It is certainly causing inflation. There's no doubt about that one. So they're looking at these various cryptocurrencies and saying, well, what can we do? How can we have like a gold standard where the us dollar was the currency the world used and it, its value was known.

[00:46:46] You see, having a stable currency is incredibly important for consumers and businesses. A business needs to know, Hey, listen, like we sign a three year contract with our vendors and with our customers. And so we need a stable price. So we know what's our cost going to be, what can we charge our customer here?

[00:47:06] Can the customer bear the price increases, et cetera. The answer to most of those questions of course is no, they really, they really can't is particularly in this day and age. So having a. Fixed currency. We know how much it's worth. I know in two years from now, I'm not gonna be completely upside down with this customer because I'm having to eat some major increases in prices.

[00:47:31] And as a consumer, you wanna look at it and say, wow, I've got a variable rate interest rate on my mortgage. And man, I remember friends of mine back in the eighties, early eighties, late seventies, who just got nailed by this. They had variable rate interest loan on their home because that's all they could get.

[00:47:50] That's all they could afford. So the variable rate just kept going up. It was higher than credit cards are nowadays. And I remember a friend of mine complaining, they had 25% interest and that's when they lost a house because 25% interest means if you have a a hundred thousand dollars loan, you got $25,000 in interest that year, you know, let alone principal payments.

[00:48:14] So it, it was a really. Thing. It was really hard for people to, to deal with. And I, I can understand that. So the cryptocurrency guys. I said, okay, well let's tie it to something else. So the value has a value and part of what they were trying to tie it to is the us dollar. That's some currencies decided to do that.

[00:48:39] And there were others that tried to tie it to actual. Assets. So it wasn't just tied to the dollar. It was okay. We have X dollars in this bank account and that's, what's backing the value of our currency, which is quite amazing, right. To think about that. Some of them are backed by gold or other precious metals.

[00:49:02] Nowadays that includes a lot of different metals. Well, this one coin called Tara Luna dropped almost a hundred percent last week. Isn't that amazing. And it had a sister token called Tara us D which Tara Luna was tied to. Now, this is all called stablecoin. Right? The idea is the prices will be stable. and in the case of Tara and Tara S D the stability was provided by a computer program.

[00:49:37] So there's nothing really behind it, other than it can be backed by the community currencies themselves. So that's something like inter coined, for instance, this is another one of the, there are hundreds of them out there of these, uh, cryptocurrencies. The community backs it. So the goods and services that you can get in some of these communities is what gives value to inter Pointe money system.

[00:50:03] Now that makes sense too, right? Because the dollar is only worth something to you. If it's worth something to someone else, right. If you were the only person in the world that had us dollars, who, who would want. Like, obviously the economy is working without us dollars. So why would they try and trade with you?

[00:50:24] If you had something called a us dollar that nobody else had, or you came up with something, you made something up out of thin air and said, okay, well this is now worth this much. Or it's backed by that, et cetera. Because if again, if you can't spend it, it's not worth anything. Anyhow, this is a very, very big deal because on top of these various cryptocurrencies losing incredible amounts of money over the last couple of weeks, We have another problem with cryptocurrencies.

[00:50:59] If you own cryptocurrencies, you have, what's called a wallet and that wallet has a transaction number that's used for you to track and, and others to track the money that you have in the cryptocurrencies. And it it's, um, pretty good little. Fun function or feature. It's kind of hard for a lot of people to do so they have these kind of crypto banks.

[00:51:21] So if you have one of these currencies, you can just have your currency on deposit at this bank because there's, there's a whole bunch of reasons, but one of the reasons is if. There is a, a run on a bank, or if there's a run on a cryptocurrency, currencies have built into them incredibly expensive penalties.

[00:51:45] If you try and liquidate that cryptocurrency quickly. And also if there are a lot of people trying to liquidate it. So you had kind of a double whammy and people were paying more than three. Coin in order to sell Bitcoin. And so think about that. Think about much of Bitcoin's worth, which is tens of thousands of dollars.

[00:52:05] So it's overall, this is a problem. It's been a very big problem. So people put it into a bank. So coin base is one of the big one coin coin base had its first quarter Ernie's report. Now, this is the us' largest cryptocurrency exchange and they had a quarterly loss for the first quarter of 2022 of 430 million.

[00:52:35] That's their loss. And they had an almost 20% drop in monthly users of coin. So that's something right. And they put it in their statement, their quarterly statement here as to, you know, what's up. Well, here's the real scary part Coinbase said in its earning earnings report. Last Tuesday that it holds the.

[00:53:01] 256 billion in both Fiat currencies and crypto currencies on behalf of its customers. So Fiat currencies are, are things like the federal reserve notes, our us dollar. Okay. A quarter of a trillion dollars that it's holding for other people kind of think of it like a bank. However, they said in the event, Coinbase we ever declare bankruptcy, quote, the crypto assets.

[00:53:31] We hold in custody on behalf of our customers could be subject to bankruptcy proceedings. Coinbase users would become general unsecured creditors, meaning they have no right to claim any specific property from the exchange in proceedings people's funds would become inaccessible. Very big deal. Very scary for a very, very good reason.

[00:53:57] Hey, when we come back, uh, websites, you know, you go, you type stuff in email address, do you know? You don't even have to hit submit. In most cases, they're stealing it.

[00:54:09] I'm sure you've heard of JavaScript in your browser. This is a programming language that actually runs programs right there in your web browser, whether you like it or not. And we just had a study on this. A hundred thousand websites are collecting your information up-front.

[00:54:26] This is not a surprising thing to me. I have a, in my web browser, I have JavaScript turned off for most websites that I go to now, JavaScript is a programming language and it lets them do some pretty cool things on a webpage.

[00:54:44] In fact, that's the whole idea behind Java. Uh, just like cookies on a web browser where they have a great use, which is to help keep track of what you're doing on the website, where you're going, pulling up other information that you care about, right? Part of your navigation can be done with cookies. They go on and on in their usefulness, but.

[00:55:06] Part of the problem is that people are using them to track you online. So like Facebook and many others will go ahead and have their cookies on other websites. So they know where you're going, what you're doing, even when you're not on Facebook, that's by the way, part of. The Firefox browser's been trying to overcome here.

[00:55:31] They have a special fenced in mode that happens automatically when you're using Firefox on Facebook. Pretty good. Pretty cool. The apple iOS devices. Use a different mechanism. And in fact, they're already saying that Facebook and some of these others who sell advertiser, Infor advertisers information about you have really had some major losses in revenue because apple is blocking their access to certain information about you back to Javas.

[00:56:07] It's a programming language that they can use to do almost anything on your web browser. Bad guys have figured out that if they can get you to go to a website or if they can insert and add onto a page that you're visiting, they can then use. Your web browser, because it's basically just a computer to do what well, to mind Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.

[00:56:34] So you are paying for the electricity for them as your computer is sitting there crunching on, uh, these algorithms that they need to use to figure out how to find the next Bitcoin or whatever. Be, and you are only noticing that your device is slowing down. For instance, our friends over on the Android platform have found before that sometimes their phones are getting extremely hot, even when they're not using them.

[00:57:01] And we've found that yeah, many times that's just a. Bitcoin minor who has kind of taken over partial control of your phone just enough to mind Bitcoin. And they did that through your web browser and JavaScript. So you can now see some of the reasons that I go ahead and disable JavaScript on most websites I go to now, some websites aren't gonna work.

[00:57:24] I wanna warn you up front. If you go into your browser settings and turn off JavaScript, you are going. Break a number of websites, in fact, many, many websites that are out there. So you gotta kind of figure out which sites you want it on, which sites don't you want it on. But there's another problem that we have found just this week.

[00:57:45] And it is based on a study that was done. It's reported in ours Technica, but they found. A hundred thousand top websites, a hundred thousand top websites. These include signing up for a newsletter making hotel reservation, checking out online. Uh, you, you probably take for granted that you nothing happens until you hit submit, right?

[00:58:11] That used to be the case in web 1.0 days. It isn't anymore. Now I wanna point out we, I have thousands of people who are on my email list. So every week they get my, my, uh, insider show notes. So these are the top articles of the week. They are, you know, usually six to 10 articles, usually eight of them that are talking about cybersecurity, things of importance in.

[00:58:39] The whole radio show and podcast are based on those insider show notes that I also share with the host of all of the different radio shows and television shows that I appear on. Right. It's pretty, pretty cool. So they get that, but I do not use this type of technology. Yeah. There's some JavaScript that'll make a little sign up thing, come up at the top of the screen, but I am not using technology that is in your face or doing.

[00:59:08] What these people are doing, right? So you start filling out a form. You haven't hit cement. And have you noticed all of a sudden you're getting emails from. Right. It's happened to me before. Well, your assumption about hitting submit, isn't always the case. Some researchers from KU LUN university and university of Lue crawled and analyzed the top 100,000 websites.

[00:59:37] So crawling means they have a little robot that goes to visit the webpage, downloads all of the code that's on the page. And then. Analyzed it all right. So what they found was that a user visiting a site, if the, the user is in the European union is treated differently than someone who visits the site from the United States.

[01:00:01] Now there's a good reason for this. We've helped companies with complying with the GDPR, which are these protection rules that are in place in the European union. And that's why you're seeing so many websites. Mine included that say, Hey, listen, we do collect some information on you. You can click here to find out more and some websites let you say no, I don't want you to have any information about me.

[01:00:26] We collect information just so that you can navigate the site properly. Okay. Very basic, but that's why European union users are treated differently than those coming from the United States. So this new research found that over 1800 websites gathered an EU user's email address without their consent. So it's almost 2000 websites out of the top 100,000.

[01:00:54] If you're in the EU and they found. About well, 3000 websites logged a us user's email in some form. Now that's, before you hit submit. So you start typing in your email, you type in your name and you don't hit submit. Many of the sites are apparently grabbing that information, putting it into the database and maybe even started using it before you gave them explicit permission to do.

[01:01:27] Isn't that a fascinating and the 1800 sites that gathered information on European news union users without their consent are breaking the law. That's why so many us companies decided they had to comply with the GDPR because it's a real big problem. So these guys also crawled websites for password leaks and May, 2021.

[01:01:55] And they found 52 websites where third parties, including Yex Yex is. Big Russian search engine a and more were collecting password data before submission. So since then the group went ahead and let the websites know what was happening, what they found, uh, because it's not necessarily intentional by the website itself.

[01:02:21] It might be a third party, a third party piece of software. That's doing it. They, they informed those sites. Hey, listen, you're collecting user data before there's been explicit consent to collect it. In other words, you, before you hit the submit button and they thought, wow, this is a very surprising, they thought they might find a few hundred website, but.

[01:02:45] Course of a year now they found that there were over 3000 websites really that were doing this stuff. So they presented their findings at Usenet. Well, actually they haven't presented 'em yet. Cuz it's gonna be at use N's. In August and these are what they call leaky forums. So yet another reason to turn off JavaScript when you can.

[01:03:09] But I also gotta add a lot of the forums do not work if JavaScript's not enabled. So we gotta do something about it. Uh, maybe complain, make sure they aren't clutching your data. Maybe I should do a little course on that one so you can figure out are they doing it before even giving permission? Anyhow, this is Craig Peter son.

[01:03:29] Visit me online. Craig Peter son.com and sign up for that. No obligation inside your show notes.

[01:03:36] We are shipping all kinds of military equipment over to Ukraine. And right now they're talking about another $30 billion worth of equipment being shipped to what was the world's number one arms dealer - Ukraine.

[01:03:53] I'm looking right now at an article that was in the Washington post. And you know, some of their stuff is good.

[01:04:01] Some of their stuff is bad, I guess, kinda like pretty much any media outlet, but they're raising some really good points here. One of them is that we are shipping some pretty advanced equipment and some not so advanced equipment to Ukraine. To help them fight in this war to protect themselves from Russia.

[01:04:24] Now, you know, all of that, that's, that's pretty common. Ultimately looking back in history, there have been a lot of people who've made a lot of money off of wars. Many of the big banks financing, both sides of wars. Going way, way back and coming all the way up through the 20th century. And part of the way people make money in war time is obviously making the equipment, the, and supplies and stuff that the armies need.

[01:04:57] The other way that they do it is by trading in arms. So not just the supplies. The bullets all the way through the advanced missile systems. Now there's been some concerns because of what we have been seen online. We've talked about telegram here before, not the safest web, you know, app to use in order to keep in touch.

[01:05:24] It's really an app for your phone and it's being used. Ukraine to really coordinate some of their hacker activities against Russia. They've also been using it in Russia, te telegram that is in order to kind of communicate with each other. Ukraine has posted pictures of some of the killed soldiers from Russia and people have been reaching out to their mothers in Russia.

[01:05:53] They've done a lot of stuff with telegram it's interest. And hopefully eventually we'll find out what the real truth is, right? Because all sides in the military use a lot of propaganda, right? The first casualty in war is the truth. It always has been. So we're selling to a country, Ukraine that has made a lot of money off of selling.

[01:06:19] Been systems being an inter intermediary. So you're not buying the system from Russia? No, no. You're buying it from Ukraine and it has been of course, just as deadly, but now we are sending. Equipment military great equipment to Ukraine. We could talk about just that a lot. I, I mentioned the whole lend lease program many months ago.

[01:06:45] Now it seems to be in the news. Now takes a while for the mainstream media to catch up with us. I'm usually about six to 12 weeks ahead of what they're talking about. And so when we're talking about Lynn Le, it means. We're not giving it to them. We're not selling it to them. We're just lending them the equipment or perhaps leasing it just like we did for the United Kingdom back in world.

[01:07:10] Wari, not a bad idea. If you want to get weapons into the hands of an adversary and not really, or not an adversary, but an ally or potential ally against an adversary that you have, and they have. But part of the problem is we're talking about Ukraine here. Ukraine was not invited in NATO because it was so corrupt.

[01:07:33] You might remember. they elected a new president over there that president started investigating, hired a prosecutor to go after the corruption in Ukraine. And then you heard president Joe Biden, vice president at the time bragging about how he got this guy shut down. Uh, yeah, he, he got the prosecutor shut down the prosecutor that had his sights on, of course hunter Biden as well as other people.

[01:08:00] So it it's a real problem, but. Let's set that aside for now, we're talking about Ukraine and the weapon systems we've been sending over there. There have been rumors out there. I haven't seen hard evidence, but I have seen things in various papers worldwide talking about telegrams, saying. That the Ukrainians have somehow gotten their hands on these weapons and are selling them on telegram.

[01:08:30] Imagine that, uh, effectively kind of a dark web thing, I guess. So we're, we're saying, well, you know, Biden administration, uh, you know, yeah. Okay. Uh, that, that none of this is going to happen. Why? Well, because we went ahead and we put into the contracts that they could not sell or share or give any of this equipment away without the explicit permission of the United States government.

[01:09:01] Well, okay. That, that kind of sounds like it's not a bad idea. I would certainly put it into any contract like this, no question, but what could happen here? If this equipment falls into the hands of our adversaries or, or other Western countries, NATO countries, how do you keep track of them? It it's very hard to do.

[01:09:22] How do you know who's actually using them? Very hard to do so enforcing these types of contracts is very difficult, which makes a contract pretty weak, frankly. And then let's look at Washington DC, the United States, according to the Washington post in mid April, gave Ukraine a fleet of I 17 helicopter.

[01:09:49] Now these MI 17 helicopters are Russian, originally Soviet designs. Okay. And they were bought by the United States. About 10 years ago, we bought them for Afghan's government, which of course now has been deposed, but we still have our hands on some of these helicopters. And when we bought them from Russia, We signed a contract.

[01:10:16] The United States signed a contract promising not to transfer the helicopters to any third country quote without the approval of the Russian Federation. Now that's according to a copy of the certificate that's posted on the website of Russia's federal service on military technical cooperation. So there you.

[01:10:38] Russia's come out and said that our transfer, those helicopters has grossly violated the foundations of international law. And, and you know, what they, it has, right. Arms experts are saying that Russia's aggression Ukraine more than justifies us support, but the violations of the weapons contracts, man, that really hurts our credibility and the, our we're not honoring these contracts.

[01:11:06] How can we expect Ukraine to honor those contracts? That's where the problem really comes in. And it's ultimately a very, very big problem. So this emergency spending bill that it, you know, the $30 billion. Makes Ukraine, the world's single largest recipient of us security assistance ever. They've received more in 2022 than United States ever provided to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel in a single year.

[01:11:40] So they're adding to the stockpiles of weapons that we've already committed. We've got 1400 stinger anti-aircraft systems, 5,500 anti tank, Mitch missiles, 700 switch blade drones, nine 90. Excuse me, long range Howards. That's our Tillery 7,000 small arms. 50 million rounds of ammunition and other minds, explosives and laser guided rocket systems, according to the Washington post.

[01:12:10] So it's fascinating to look. It's a real problem. And now that we've got the bad guys who are using the dark web, remember the dark web system that we set up, the onion network. Yeah. That one, uh, they can take these, they can sell them, they can move them around. It is a real problem. A very big problem. What are we gonna do when all of those weapons systems come back aimed at us this time?

[01:12:40] You know, it's one thing to leave billions of dollars worth of helicopters, et cetera, back in Afghanistan is the Biden administration did with their crazy withdrawal tactic. Um, but at least those will wear out the bullets, missile systems, Howard, yours, huh? Different deal.

[01:13:01] It seems like the government calls war on everything, the war against drugs or against poverty. Well, now we are looking at a war against end to end encryption by government's worldwide, including our own.

[01:13:18] The European union is following in America's footstep steps, again, only a few years behind this time.

[01:13:27] Uh, but it's not a good thing. In this case, you might remember a few have been following cybersecurity. Like I have back in the Clinton administration, there was a very heavy push for something called the clipper chip. And I think that whole clipper chip. Actually started with the Bush administration and it was a bad, bad thing, uh, because what they were trying to do is force all businesses to use this encryption chip set that was developed and promoted by the national security agency.

[01:14:04] And it's supposed to be an encryption device that is used to secure, uh, voice and data messages. And it had a built in. Back door that allowed federal state, local law enforcement, anybody that had the key, the ability to decode any intercepted voice or data transmissions. It was introduced in 93 and was thank goodness.

[01:14:32] Defunct by 1996. So it used something called skip Jack man. I remember that a lot and it used it to transfer dilly or Diffy excuse me, Hellman key exchange. I've worked with that before crypto keys. It used, it used the, uh, Des algorithm, the data encryption standard, which is still used today. And the Clinton administration argued that the clipper chip was.

[01:14:59] Absolutely essential for law enforcement to keep up with a constantly progressing technology in the United States. And a lot of people believe that using this would act as frankly, an additional way for terrorists to receive information and to break into encrypted information. And the Clinton administration argued that it, it would increase national security because terrorists would have to use it to communicate with outsiders, bank, suppliers, contacts, and the government could listen in on those calls.

[01:15:33] Right. Aren't we supposed to in United States have have a right to be secure in our papers and other things, right? The, the federal government has no right to come into any of that stuff unless they get a court order. So they were saying, well, we would take this key. We'll make sure that it's in a, a lock box, just like Al gore social security money.

[01:15:55] And no one would be able to get their hands on it, except anyone that wanted to, unless there was a court order and you know how this stuff goes, right. It, it just continues to progress. And. A lot worse. Well, there was a lot of backlash by it. The electronic privacy information center, electronic frontier foundation boast, both pushed back saying that it would not.

[01:16:20] Only have the effect of, of not, excuse me, have the effect of this is a quote, not only subjecting citizens to increased impossibly illegal government surveillance, but that the strength of the clipper trips encryption could not be evaluated by the public as its design. Was classified secret and that therefore individuals and businesses might be hobbled with an insecure communication system, which is absolutely true.

[01:16:48] And the NSA went on to do some things like pollute, random number generators and other things to make it so that it was almost impossible to have end-to-end encrypted data. So we were able to kill. Many years ago. Now what about 30 years ago? Uh, when they introduced this thing? Well, it took a few years to get rid of it, but now the EU is out there saying they want to stop end, end encryption.

[01:17:16] The United States has already said that, or the new director of Homeland security has, and as well as Trump's, uh, again, Homeland security people said we need to be able to break the. And, and we've talked about some of the stories, real world stories of things that have happened because of the encryption.

[01:17:37] So the EU has now got a proposal forward that would force tech companies to scan private messages for child sexual abuse material called CSAM and evidence of grooming. Even when those messages are supposed to be protected by end to end encrypt. So we know how this goes, right? It, it starts at something that's, everybody can agree on, right?

[01:18:05] This child, sexual abuse material, uh, abductions of children, all, you know, there's still a lot of slavery going on in the world. All of that stuff needs to be stopped. And so we say, yeah, yeah. Okay. That makes a whole lot of sense, but where does it end? Online services that receive detection orders. This is from ours Technica under the pending European union legislation would have obligations concerning the detection, the reporting, the removal and blocking of known and new.

[01:18:38] Child sexual abuse material as well as solicitation of children. So what we're starting to see here in the us is some apps, some companies that make smartphones, for instance, looking at pictures that are sent and shared to see if it looks like it might be pornographic in some way. because again, we're seeing younger kids who are sending pictures of each other naked or body parts naked to others.

[01:19:04] If you can believe that. Absolutely incredible. But what happens when you send them using an end-to-end encrypted app? Now, my advice for people who want to keep information private, you're a business person you're working on a deal. You don't go to Twitter like Elon Musk and put it out there for the world to.

[01:19:26] Although, I'm sure he's got some ulterior motives in doing that. You use an app called signal. That's certainly the best one that's out there right now. It provides a whole lot of encryption and privacy, and even has some stuff built in to break the software. That's often used to break into the end to end encryption systems.

[01:19:48] So they're trying to get this in place here. They're calling it an important security tool. But it's ordering companies to break that end to end encryption by whatever technological means necessary. It it's gonna be hard because frankly it's gonna be impossible for them to enforce this because you can take encrypted data and make it look like almost.

[01:20:11] Anything, and man has that happened for a long time. Think of the micro dots, way back when Seline world, world war II and on, they were very popular there's techniques to encrypt data and embedded in a photograph and make it almost impossible to detect. So again, they're, they're not going to get to do what they're hoping to do.

[01:20:37] And, and I think that's an important thing for everybody. Pay pay close attention to, so they do want to get rid of end to end there's WhatsApp out there, which I don't really trust cuz is owned by Facebook, but that's supposedly end to end. There's end to end encryption on apple iMessage, although up.

[01:20:57] Apparently, there are some ways to get into that. I think apple is now maintaining a secondary key that they can use to decrypt, but the back doors that the us has called for and other people have called for. Have been pushed back by companies like apple Apple's CEO, Tim cook, opposed government mandated back doors.

[01:21:20] Of course, apple got a major backlash from security experts when unveiled a plan to have iPhones and other devices, scan user photos for child sexual abuse images. That's what I was referring to earlier. And apple put that plan on hold and promised to make changes. But this is apple all over again. And it's hard to say what's the least privacy intrusive way, because if the is S P can read them all, if the company that's providing you with the app that you're using to send the message.

[01:21:53] Can read them all, how much privacy is there and if they can read it, who else can read it and what can be done with it? Blackmail has happened many times in the past because someone got their hands on something. So what happens when a, a Congressman or the military or someone in the military uses that that's another problem.

[01:22:14] Because if we don't know the way the encryption is is, is, uh, being used or is made just like, was true with a clipper chip. And then we move on to the next step, which is okay. So what do we do now with this data that we're storing? Are they going to keep that data confidential? Can they keep it outta the hands of the criminals.

[01:22:38] We've certainly found that they just haven't been able to. And if you're talking about grooming, which is what the European union wants. In other words, someone that's trying to get a child to the point where they're doing something that would be abhorrent. Uh, you've got to. Look at all of the, all of the messages, you have to have them analyzed by some sort of an AI artificial intelligence, and then ultimately analyzed by people.

[01:23:05] It it's just gonna get worse and worse. Right? This is the most sophisticated mass surveillance machinery. That has ever been deployed outside of China in the USSR. It, it's absolutely incredible when you look at it from a cryptographic standpoint. And again, we understand protecting the children. We all want to do that, but how far will this end up going?

[01:23:29] I also wanna point out that my. New, uh, insider show notes that I've been sending out over the last few weeks have had some amazing responses from people. I I've had people saying that this is what they look for in their mailbox. It's the first piece of email they read that it's the most relevant news that they get.

[01:23:49] But you can only get it one way and that's by going to Craig peterson.com, you can sign up there. It's easy enough to do. There's no obligation on your part, right? This is not my paid newsletter. This is absolutely free. And it's incredibly valuable. Plus I'll also be sending you once a week-ish a small training, just, it takes you a few minutes to read.

[01:24:14] I just last week went through the firewall in your windows machine, the firewall in. And gave you step by step instructions. Is it turned on? What is it doing? What should it do? How do you turn it on and how do you use it? So you can only get that one way and that's, if you are on my email list, so it's important to be there.

[01:24:36] And if you have any questions you can hit reply to. Any of those emails, whether it's the training or if it's the insider show notes, just hit re reply. And I'll go ahead and answer your question. You might have to wait a few days cuz I can get pretty busy sometimes, but always answer. So me, me@craigpeterson.com.

[01:24:57] Anybody can send me email and you can also text me at 6 1 7 503 2 2 1 6 1 7 500. 3, 2, 2, 1 with any questions. Well, that's it for right now, there is so much more. Make sure you sign up right now.